The banking industry is seeing a move toward “bunch deposits” at self-service terminals (SSTs), such as automated teller machines (ATMs). The “bunch deposit” allows the banking customer to insert multiple valuable media items (e.g., bank notes and paper checks) into an SST all at once for deposit to a financial account. During a bunch deposit, the SST separates the items in the bunch, creates one or more images of each of the items, and analyzes the images to assess the validity of the items. In some cases, the SST also displays the images of the items to the customer so that the customer can confirm that the items are properly credited to the customer's account.
For valuable items such as bank notes, the SST must recognize each of the items (e.g., its currency and denomination) before it can validate the item. In most systems, recognition is complicated by the large number of bank notes that can be deposited (e.g., $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 denominations in the United States), as well as the fact that each note can be inserted into the SST with any of four possible orientations. The SST must be able to recognize every bank note, both valid and counterfeit, regardless of its denomination and its orientation upon insertion.
Up to now, traditional note recognition techniques require currency templates that are extremely labor intensive to create. Creating these templates requires a great deal of human involvement in selecting key features of each bank note in every possible orientation. Each time a new bank note is released or changes are made to an existing note, the currency templates must be updated in the SST, again requiring the expertise of humans trained in identifying key features of the notes.